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©
Kurt and Ernst Schwitters Foundation, VEGAP, Madrid
Kurt Schwitters

Merzbild 1A (The Psychiatrist)

1919
Oil, assemblage and collage of objects on canvas.
48.5 x 38.5 cm
Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
Inv. no.
746
(
1978.57
)
ROOM 44
Level 1
Permanent Collection
30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 Postpop rooms Rodin room
30 18th and 19th Centuries. Transatlantic Relations 31 19th Century. American Landscape and Environmental Awareness 32 19th Century. American Landscape and Urban Life 33 Recovering the ligth. Restoration of Waterloo Bridge, by André Derain 34 20th Century. Expressionist Landscapes 35 20th Century. Expressionist Portraits 36 20th Century. The Language of the Body 37 20th Century. Urban unrest 38 20th Century. Flowers 39 20th Century. Pioneers of abstraction 40 20th Century. Popular flavor 41 20th Century. The Cubist Tradition I 42 20th Century. The Cubist Tradition II 43 20th Century. Abstract Utopias 44 20th Century. Dada and Surrealism 45 20th Century. Interwar Realisms 46 20th Century. American Abstraction I 48 20th Century. Post-ward American Art 49 20th Century. Post-ward European Figurative Art 50 20th Century. Informalisms 51 20th Century. Homo Ludens 52 20th Century. Pop Art 53 Postpop rooms 54 Postpop rooms 55 Postpop rooms 56 Postpop rooms Rodin Exhibition room
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Discover some of the secrets and details invaluable to the human eye in this work.

The name Dada first appeared in Hugo Ball’s magazine Cabaret Voltaire, published in Zurich in 1916, to define an irrational, provocative art that employed unorthodox techniques. It soon spread through many other European cities such as Berlin, Cologne, Paris and Hanover. The Hanover Dadaist group was headed by Kurt Schwitters, an artist who, although inspired by the revolutionary atmosphere of post-war Germany, was more in tune with the values of constructive abstraction than with the subversive politicisation of the Dadaists.

Through his collages and assemblages, generally entitled or subtitled Merz, Schwitters aimed to achieve an artistic synthesis, a new aesthetic order using waste products, convinced — to quote his own words — that “one can even shout out through refuse.” The artist had invented the word Merz by chance when he cut it out of the longer Kommerz, which had fascinated him for its sound. Merz was a blend of the Dadaist pursuit of irony and paradox through the transformation of objects and the Russian avant-gardes’ notion of art as construction. It also drew from Cubist collages, although unlike the objects the Cubists incorporated into their compositions, the materials Schwitters employed in his works were not representations of external reality but mere signs; they had no value in their own right, only as integral parts of a composition.

Merzbild 1A (The Psychiatrist), executed in 1919, is an early example of the formal structures of the Merz compositions and combines texture and colour with various geometrically shaped objects. According to John Elderfield in his monograph on the artist, it is one of the earliest Merz pictures, if not the first, and was most likely shown in Schwitters’ one-man exhibition at Der Sturm gallery in Berlin in July 1919, the date that his text “Die Merzmalerei” was published in the magazine by the same name. The inscriptions Schwitters made on the stretcher dating the work to 13 February 1919 and numbering it “1A” back this hypothesis, which, if correct, would make Merzbild 1A (Der Irrenarzt) Schwitters’ first Merz composition.

Furthermore, the fact that Merzbild 1A is an early work in which the abstract Merz language is not yet fully consolidated accounts for the expressionistic figurative references it retains. The depiction of a face in profile in the composition, together with the subtitle Der Irrenarzt (The Psychiatrist), suggest that it is a hybrid between an Expressionist portrait and a Dada assemblage. It is most likely the portrait of an acquaintance of his from Hanover, Dr Schenzinger, though some authors believe it could be the painter’s sister. In a text entitled “The origin of Merz, ” written in the manner of a humorous fable, the artist tells of the portrait of Dr Schenzinger, who insisted on playing a Beethoven sonata on the piano while sitting for him. Schwitters’ attention had been caught by a beer mat and, as he recounts, “an inspiration came upon me. I stood up, painted the back of the beer mat not with paste but with red paint and glued it thus on to the cheek of the profiled head that I had painted.” When the bewildered sitter insisted he remove it, Schwitters replied that were he to do so he would “destroy the unity of the art work.” In addition to the beer mat, the artist collected various nearby objects such as wires, a newspaper cutting, a cigarette and several pieces of metal and progressively added them to the composition, perhaps to symbolise the obsessions of the psychiatrist’s patients. This anecdote not only gives an account of how the Merz works came about, but is also, as Christopher Green points out, “the ‘origin of Merz’ told as a modern fable.”

Paloma Alarcó

20th Centurys. XX - Pintura europea. DadaísmoPaintingOil, assemblage and collage of objectscanvas
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Merzbild 1A (The Psychiatrist). Merzbild 1A (El psiquiatra), 1919
Merzbild 1A (The Psychiatrist)
Kurt Schwitters

©

Kurt and Ernst Schwitters Foundation, VEGAP, Madrid

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Merzbild 1A (The Psychiatrist). Merzbild 1A (El psiquiatra), 1919
Merzbild 1A (The Psychiatrist)
Kurt Schwitters

©

Kurt and Ernst Schwitters Foundation, VEGAP, Madrid

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